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﻿[Back in the late 1940’s I worked for philosopher Mortimer Adler on the Syntopicon, an index to the ideas in the (then) 54 volume set of The Great Books of the Western World. As my field was the biological sciences, I was assigned to index the biological works of Aristotle, Hippocrates, Harvey, Galen, and Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species and The Descent of Man. I have written before about the evolution of my thoughts on evolution. As my thinking became more critical over the years, I wrote the following reflection on Darwin’s work.]

OF GOD, EYES, AND EVOLUTION

Consider the eye on the tail of the peacock. Technically known as an ocellus, it is a thing of awesome beauty, an intensely blue center surrounded by iridescent concentric colored circles, to be enjoyed many times over as the peacock raises and displays his plumage. It seems to have no purpose but to please the observer. Darwin called the peacock the most splendid of living birds. He writes: “That these ornaments should have been formed through the selection of many successive variations, not one of which was originally intended to produce the ball-and-socket effect, seems as incredible as that one of Raphael’s Madonnas should have been formed by the selection of chance daubs of paint made by a long succession of artists, not one of whom intended at first to draw the human figure.”

Obviously, even Darwin had trouble in believing in his theory of natural selection!

Nevertheless, natural selection and sexual selection as described by Darwin DO operate by chance. A brighter color or more beautiful design appears by happenstance, (or, as we would say today, by some quirk of a gene) and appeals to the peahen so that the more elegant peacock pleases her most and wins the opportunity to pass along his genes to the next generation. Darwin attributes to the peahen an apparent delight in beauty, which he also considers strange. Unlike the cock, the peahen remains drab, her coloring protecting her as she nests and cares for her young.

The peahen choosing the more beautiful male is an example of sexual selection. The survival of the hen and chicks because their drabness hides them from predators would be considered an example of natural selection.

Consider again the eye on the tail of the peacock and the feather on which it is found. A feather consists of a central shaft with barbs on each side equipped with barbules which turn bear barbicels which interlock, velcro-fashion, with similar structures on the adjacent barb, producing a continuous vane. No person comes along and paints the ocellus on this plume after it has formed. No, each individual barb must “know how” to produce the right colors in the right place to achieve the overall ball-in-socket effect. It boggles the mind that there are those who would believe this marvelous arrangement of minutiae to produce an ocellus came about as the result of the random activity of atoms.

It likewise boggles the mind to think that your eye (the kind in your head) with eyelid, lens, pupil, iris, retina and optic nerve gradually evolved over millenia. Any of these parts without the other would be useless and would not have persisted by natural selection. Evolutionists need a scenario that will demonstrate how all the parts of a functional eye could come about AT THE SAME TIME just by accident. Darwin also had trouble with this, stating “the belief that an organ so perfect as the eye could have been formed by natural selection is enough to stagger anyone…”

Many genetic mutations are harmful, causing disease or death, others are neutral, but among random mutations one might occasionally occur which would seem to be advantageous. It has been estimated that only 1 out of 10,000 mutations would be considered beneficial. We know that natural selection, or artificial selection by man, can, within a species, cause considerable diversity–witness Mendel’s peas, various breeds of dogs, the development of drug-resistant bacteria. No one really has any problem accepting such diversification within a species. This is known as “micro-evolution” and has been well demonstrated.

Natural selection and geographical factors have allowed populations within species to drift in different directions and mutate to such an extent that they can no longer interbreed, producing a subspecies or even a new species. Micro-evolution is a scientific fact, only resulting in minor changes. Frogs always give rise to frogs, and dogs to dogs. No matter how much one radiates fruit flies to get them to mutate, they always give rise to fruit flies. Sometimes they are very sad specimens but they are undoubtedly fruit flies.

It is MACRO-evolution that presents the problem. Macro-evolution extrapolates from the known variations within a species to the theory that all diversity in life – plants, reptiles, birds, fish, mammals – all evolved in similar fashion from some prehistoric archetype. This is another problem that Darwin himself puzzled over. He noted the lack of evidence for transitional forms between classes in the progression from single-celled organisms to man, stating, “Why, if species have descended from other species by insensibly fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms? Why is not all nature in confusion instead of the species being, as we see them, well defined?” Darwin died expecting the fossil proof of his theory would be forthcoming.

It was not. Evolution is a theory being increasingly questioned by a number of honest scientists. In 1980 Darwin’s theory that one species evolved into another over billions of years was rejected by a conference in Chicago of “160 of the world’s top paleontologists, anatomists, evolutional geneticists and developmental biologists.” (Newsweek, 11/3/80). According to Newsweek , “Evidence from the fossil record now points overwhelmingly away from the classical Darwinism which most Americans learned in high school; that new species evolve out of existing ones by the gradual accumulation of small changes, each of which helps the organism survive and compete in the environment.” Because of the embarrassing absence of fossil evidence they supported instead “punctuated equilibria” which says that evolutionary changes occurred by quantum leaps, so fast that they didn’t leave any fossil record! The foremost advocates of punctuated equilibria, Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould, recognized that species in the geological record remain remarkably constant over millions of years, showing little appreciable change. In Eight Little Piggies (1993) Gould writes, “Nothing much happens for most of the time when evidence abounds; everything happens in largely unrecorded geological moments.”

As recently as 1995, Eldredge in Reinventing Darwin again notes the absence in the fossil record of gradual evolution as described by Darwin and posits, rather, evolution in brief spurts, during periods of major habitat disruption, with eons of stasis in between. These brief spurts, from the viewpoint of paleontologist Eldredge, may take from five to fifty thousand years, as compared to the millions of years when evolution apparently goes nowhere.

This new theory of punctuated equilibria does not alter the fact that Gould and Eldredge still believe in evolution and the fossil evidence is still missing. One commentator went so far as to describe their theory of punctuated equilibria as “evolution by jerks!”

In Darwin on Trial by Philip Johnson (1991) he writes, “If evolution means the gradual change of one kind of organism into another kind, the outstanding characteristic of the fossil record is the absence of evidence for evolution. Darwinists can always explain away the sudden appearance of new species by saying that the transitional intermediates were for some reason not fossilized. But stasis – the consistent absence of fundamental directional change – is positively documented. It is also the norm and not the exception.”

Some years ago I worked on the Great Books em>Syntopicon, indexing the biological works contained therein, including those of Darwin. I found Darwin to be a brilliant and honest man whose prodigious wealth of data was very convincing. It is only in recent years that my thinking became more critical and I realized that accepting Darwin’s Origin of Species required jettisoning other pretty well established physical laws.

The second law of thermodynamics states that all things naturally, over time, degenerate from order into disorder–into randomness– unless there is input from outside the system. Not so long ago the idea of spontaneous generation was ridiculed by scientists. Now we are supposed to accept, as an article of faith (because there is no proof) that life arose spontaneously in some prebiotic broth and evolved ever upward by random acts of atoms. Evolutionists theorize that somehow organic compounds formed, merged, and discovered how to replicate themselves, producing the first living cell. Never mind that scientists, with all their technology, have not

been able to achieve purposely what is supposed to have occurred long ago by chance. No amount of chemical soup zapping has yet produced a single living organism (i.e., one that can grow and reproduce.) In the famous Miller-Urey experiments in the 1950’s the best they could come up with were amino acids. Nevertheless, what was once deemed impossible must now be considered, given enough time, to be not only possible but probable. As one writer put it, we are asked to believe that “falling up a ladder” can be achieved if it is just done “rungwise.”

The basic cell design of all living things is the same, but even the cell of the tiniest bacterium is, according to molecular biologist Michael Denton, “a veritable microminiaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of one hundred thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel in the nonliving world.” Moreover, the oldest rocks known to paleontology have failed to reveal the kind of organic compounds that would have been needed to form the first living cell. There is, therefore, no evidence whatsoever of the required primeval super soup. All is conjecture, yet biology texts and the popular press write about the spontaneous development of the first living cell from some inorganic muddy puddle as a fait accompli. And even though they don’t know how life happened to develop on earth, they send expensive gadgets to outer space to see if the conditions are right for it to happen there, too!

David Raup, renowned paleontologist, wrote in Science in 1981: “A large number of well-trained scientists outside of evolutionary biology and paleontology have unfortunately gotten the idea that the fossil record is far more Darwinian than it is. This probably comes from the oversimplification inevitable in secondary sources: low-level textbooks, semi-popular articles, and so on. Also, there is probably some wishful thinking involved. In the years after Darwin, his advocates hoped to find predictable progressions. In general these have not been found, yet the optimism died hard, and some pure fantasy has crept into textbooks…”

Francis Crick, biochemist and Nobel prize-winning co-discoverer of DNA, in 1981, wrote: “An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to be satisfied to get it going.” Modern molecular biology has not been kind to evolutionary theory – the missing links – the necessary intermediate classes – are just as missing on the molecular level as on the morphological level. Molecular biology has only served to emphasize the marked discontinuity between life and non-life, and between major natural
divisions.

The above-mentioned molecular biologist, Dr. Michael Denton, created quite a stir in 1985 with his book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. In what I consider his most fascinating chapter, “The Failure of Homology,” he deals with one of evolution’s strongest arguments, the structural similarities between different organisms. As the Encyclopedia Brittanica puts it: “…the bones of the upper arm, forearm, wrist, hand and fingers all…can be matched, bone for bone, in rat, dog, horse, bat, mole, porpoise or man. The example is all the more telling because the bones have become modified in adaptation to different modes of life but have retained the same fundamental plan of structure, inherited from a common ancestor.” (Emphasis added).

Denton describes an amazing lack of that same homology at the embryological level. “There is no question that, because of the great dissimilarity of the early stages of embryogenesis in the different vertebrate classes, organs and structures considered homologous in adult vertebrates cannot be traced back to homologous cells or regions in the earliest stages of embryogenesis. In other words, homologous structures are arrived at by different developmental routes.” And, “the evolutionary basis of homology is perhaps more severely damaged by the discovery that apparently homologous structures are specified by quite different genes in different species.” Darwin describes homology as the “relationship between parts which results from their development from corresponding embryonic parts.” According to British embryologist, Gavin de Beer, that is exactly what homology is not. This is a truly an astounding–and unexpected–finding!

Die-hard Darwinian, Richard Dawkins, in his 1995 effort, River Out of Eden, does not acknowledge Denton’s book nor does he attempt to answer most of his objections to macro-evolutionary theory. He does try to deal with the difficulty of accepting chance as the cause of a structure as beautiful and complex as the human eye. He accuses those who think that it must have been designed by a superior intelligence of the fallacy of the “Argument from Personal Incredulity.” This argument states “I cannot even begin to imagine the steps by which this eye could have evolved from an eyeless being and therefore I don’t believe it could have happened.”

Evolution by gradual changes through natural selection might be accepted today beyond any reasonable doubt, even without the fossil evidence of intermediates, if it could be shown that the great divisions of nature could at least theoretically have been bridged by inventing a really convincing series of hypothetical and fully functional transitional forms. (After all, time has passed and things do decay–there’s that second law of thermodynamics again!) However, this has not been achieved. A theory that asks us to believe that order proceeds from disorder, that design arises without a designer, and doesn’t show us how, requires an unwarranted leap of faith.

Dawkins offers a computer model by Swedish scientists, Dan Nilsson and Susanne Pelger (1994) suggesting the steps by which a simple eye consisting of a flat retina atop a flat pigment layer covered by a protective transparent layer could conceivably have evolved into a vertebrate “camera” eye in less than half a million years. They assume that each generation experienced a beneficial mutation which was passed on. I cannot blame them for starting with a simple three-layer eye. Producing the scenario by which an eye evolved from some eyeless ancestor would certainly have been a much more difficult accomplishment. A computer model showing how a more advanced eye could evolve from a simpler eye simply does not cut the mustard.

It is posited that the first birds evolved from prehistoric reptiles and that reptilian scales are precursors of the feathers of birds. Just imagining the gradations and mutations necessary to convert a scale into an aerodynamically plausible feather, with functional intermediates, is well nigh impossible.

According the Albert Einstein, “the probability of life originating from accidents is comparable to the probability of the unabridged dictionary resulting from an explosion in the printing shop.” In like manner, British astronomer and agnostic, Sir Fred Hoyle, after years of study concluded, “The probability of evolution [explaining creation] is equal to the probability that a tornado sweeping through a junk yard might assemble a Boeing 747.”

The missing links are still just that, despite years of search. The Piltdown man is a proven fraud, the tooth of Nebraska man turned out to be from a pig, Neanderthal man and Cro-Magnon man seem to belong to our species, the fossils of Peking man have disappeared. Missing links between man and monkey burst upon the scene, a tooth here and a jawbone there, are interpreted and re-interpreted, and then fade away as they fail to fill the bill. Evolutionists have a hypothesis to confirm and tend to put their own spin on archeological findings.

The logical consequence of Darwinism is that the universe operates on blind chance, without design or purpose. Evolution is a theory scrambling for facts because the alternative is considered unacceptable. What is the alternative? It is that God created each creature according to its kind, as we read in Genesis.

In recent years geneticists seem to be moving toward the creationists’ belief that all races of mankind are the progeny of an original man and woman. Mitochondrial Eve, postulated as the mother of all known humans, has been making the news. By studying mitochondrial DNA which is passed on from mother to daughter geneticists have concluded that all women are descended from one woman who lived over 50,000 years ago. It is not supposed that there was only one woman way back then, however; rather it is presumed there were many but the progeny of the others died out along the way. Similarly, they have deduced that all men had a common male ancestor by studying genetic mutations of the Y chromosome which is passed only from father to son.

Scripture states, and it is de fide, that God played a direct role in the fashioning of a man and woman from whom all humankind is descended. (Gen.3:20, Gen.5, Tobit 8:6, Rom. 5:12-19, 1 Cor. 15:21-22). It is necessary to accept at least this much “creationism” or all of Christianity, with its original sin and need for redemption, falls by the wayside.

They say that the genetic information in each human cell would fill thousands of volumes. This occurred by chance? I would as soon believe that a Pentium chip occurred as a result of the waves lapping on the sand through the ages. Colin Patterson, senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History, said in 1981, “All my life I had been duped into taking evolution as revealed truth.” Dr D.N.S. Watson writes, “The theory of evolution is universally accepted not because it can be proven true but because the only alternative of special creation (by God) is clearly incredible.”

Douglas Futuyama in Science on Trial: The Case for Evolution states: “Some shrink from the conclusion that the human species was not designed, has no purpose, and is the product of more mechanical mechanisms–but this seems to be the message of evolution.” As Dawkins put it in his recent book, “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.” In essence, then, evolution is more of a philosophy of life than an explanation of it.

Over 50 years ago Pope Pius XI, writing about communism, stated: “According to this doctrine there is in the world only one reality, matter, the blind forces of which evolve into plant, animal and man….In such a doctrine, as is evident, there is no room for the idea of God; there is no difference between matter and spirit, between soul and body; there is neither survival of the soul after death nor any hope in a future life.” In the same encyclical on atheistic communism he describes what he calls a “conspiracy of silence” on the part of the secular press. It is apparent that not much has changed.

To go beyond randomness means to accept God. The above-mentioned Francis Crick was so awed by the difficulty of explaining the origin of life on earth that he postulated beings from another planet sending us primitive life forms to begin the whole evolutional spiral. Sure this is a Deus ex machina solution – which is what creationists have been saying all along.

In 1987 a Supreme Court decision barred public schools from teaching “creation science” but permitted the discussion of “scientifically valid” alternatives to evolution. In 1989 Of Pandas and People by Charles Thaxton, Percival Davis, and Dean Kenyon, all biologists and Ph.D.s, presented arguments for intelligent design, only to be attacked by the ACLU for writing a “stealth” book seeking to introduce God into the curriculum without mentioning his name. Kenyon, who had previously published a book describing the evolution of a living cell from inorganic chemicals, found himself no longer able to support that hypothesis and began to point out to his students its weakness. He was rewarded for his integrity by being suspended from San Francisco State University. To dare to suggest that the politically correct theory of evolution might be questioned and was still a theory was equivalent to a thought crime. He has since been reluctantly reinstated. (A video clip of Dean Kenyon explaining his change in viewpoint is available.)

Evolutionists try to disparage critics of Darwinism by calling them religious fanatics who refuse to look at the scientific data, preferring blind faith. There are, however, an ever increasing number of scientists who are looking at the scientific data and rocking the evolutionary boat. Secular humanism, communism, modernism NEED evolution’s philosophy to counteract biblical Christianity. There is no other alternative and they will not accept God.

Raphael’s Madonna, an unabridged dictionary, a Boeing 747, a Pentium chip–these speak of the intelligence of man behind the material thing. The human mind has not yet begun to plumb the secrets of an atom, a single living cell, the ocellus of the peacock, the eye of man, the genetic code, the expanding universe. These speak of an intelligence far beyond ours. We stand in awe of their beauty and their complexity. We seek to reveal their patterns and discover their laws, and we do no doubt such laws exist. Some we have learned; some we haven’t. Is there a designer, a lawgiver?

Chance or God? Evolution or revelation?

~~~

I believe in God, the Father almighty, Creator of heaven and earth. Apostles’ Creed.

I agree with Professor Agazzi, who says: If you read Darwin’s books, Darwin directly, You can see that he was never opposed to the idea of Creation. Never. He was always opposed to the idea of individual species being created by God or by Someone, separately rather than being the result of a transformation. What happens nowadays? Unfortunately once again in the United States there is a minority of fundamentalist Evangelicals, seeking to take the Bible word for word, as a discourse that tells us how the world was created. They call themselves creationists. Once again the term has been seized for another use. The term “creationists” does not mean in the slightest that the book of Genesis should be taken as a true story about the Cosmos. But for them it does. They say yes, here is something that at the very least should be taught alongside the theory of evolution. Once again a mistake has been made. And people say, Creationists are enemies of science and enemies of Evolution.
Regards,
Santiago Chiva
Granada, Spain

This post was edited and published by Mercatornet.com
on February 3, 2009, under the title Consider the Eye of the Peacock. My grandson, Jeremy, who has a Masters in Environmental Studies and a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Ecology had the following to say about it:

“Dear Grandma, With all due respect, your article is excellently written. However, it sets up straw men of almost all aspects of evolutionary theory. I am not going to argue evolution vs. creationism with you, and even less on Facebook. It is unproductive.
I am curious as to your opinions on the following questions:
1. How would you explain bird-hipped dinosaurs with feathers and scales?
2. If there is no speciation, then where and when do you believe all of the species known from the fossil record come from? But more importantly, did they once all live together? Or is it a one way process from many species to today’s number? Or does God occasionally create species and pop them onto Earth?
3. You don’t have to look to the fossil record to see punctuated equilibrium or climate change. Look out the window. Look at the current mass extinction. Look at the winners and the losers of global warming. Look at Guatemala’s drier and longer dry season, forest fires during every ENSO event,etc”

I am SO pleased with this comment from Jeremy. All I hope for from my progeny is that they be thinking, questioning people, able to disagree without being disagreeable.

1. Not being familiar with the bird-hipped dinosaur with feathers I looked it up. It seems the bird-hipped dinosaurs are NOT thought to be precursors to birds, the “feathers” may have been barbs or protofeathers, and from the sketches they are certainly not located where they could ever provide any lift, even if the few that were present “evolved” to many, many more. That even one feather should evolve would be a marvel – a feather is quite a complicated structure.

﻿2 and 3. Excellent questions.Where did all the species come from? I find it as easy to believe God made them as to believe they evolved from the super soup. The bible says God created “everything that moves” according to its kind, apparently over a period of time, in an order that seems congruent with paleontological findings. (A day in Genesis is taken to mean a period of time.) The Cambrian explosion comes to mind. Where do YOU think all the species came from? Where are the transitional forms? There should be some of them around right now. Where is the evidence for the pre-giraffe and the pre-elephant?

Is it a one way process from many species to today’s number?
Some species have vanished and some are vanishing. I know of no evidence for any recent new species. Do you?

Look out the window at punctuated equilibrium or climate change. It seems to me reasonable to think that climate change is cyclical and mostly beyond our puny efforts at control (sun flares, etc., etc.) The Russians are saying global freezing is in the offing. As for the punctuated equilibrium, I’ll accept that some species have become extinct but I’m waiting for something
new to pop up. Of course, maybe we could make some chimeras in the laboratory. Are you for that?

My position is not so much that I am convinced by the creationists as that I am not convinced by the evolutionists. I would need a much more in depth study of what the creationists are saying and don’t even know if I have time to try to do that. I especially don’t have the background to judge timelines. What I object to is the perception in academia is that those who read the Bible and question evolution are ignorant neanderthals, not worthy of a hearing. See the Ben Stein’s movie: Expelled! No intelligence allowed. It seems to me that they are running scared.

Do you think that everything came from NOTHING (impossible) or can you accept that everything must have come from SOMETHING (aka God, Allah, the Great Spirit) ?

Thanks, Jeremy. I have enjoyed this. I’ll be happy to hear from you again.

I believe in evolution, and not unthinkingly or unquestionably. There is plenty of evidence to demonstrate that: 1. the world was filled with species that went extinct (something like 99% of all species that existed are extinct), 2. most of these species are direct ancestors of today’s species (although there were also plenty of dead ends for family trees), 3. in the fossil record there are plenty of “intermediate forms”, although once accepted, they stop becoming intermediate and there will always be more “missing” intermediate forms, 4. in recent history, we have seen species change their genetic makeup to adapt to their environment through natural selection (moths, finches, drosophila are good examples), 5. anything that can survive long periods of time and has a mechanism to adapt “evolves” – this is not limited to life, 6 “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”, or in an animal’s developmental process you can see ancestral traits, etc. There is also evolution that does not depend on natural or sexual selection, but is the byproduct of statistics (whos genes just happen to be passd on more), genetic coupling rules, or population bottlenecks – look at the Florida Panther.

These are just some points that pop into my mind – genetic coding has offered a lot more solid evidence into relationships between species. Putting aside all (and there is a lot) of the evidence that some dinosaurs were precursors to birds, if you ever stare closely at a duck and blur your eyes, you will see a tiny dinosaur in action. If you have the imagination, it is a wonderful and beautiful feeling.

I have no problem with religion, or believing that God created all species. If evolution is real, then perhaps God created a wonderful mechanism through which species could adapt to a changing world. For me, the argument isn’t exclusive, and nobody has to be right. It is more important that we do not shun others because they believe differently.

Evolution does not imply that God doesn’t exist or isn’t important. It doesn’t necessarily contradict the Bible, which was written by men and whose literal interpretation was developed for a time and a place long changed. Life is a learning process and there is always a place for experimentation and adaptaion according to the lessons we learn.

Let me begin this consideration of the issue in practical terms by asking you to face one fact with me. Central to the whole moral, political, legal or juridical, and religious structure of Western civi-lization is the distinction which you all know and you all use every day, the distinction between person and thing. You have no doubt about this. You never call a shoe a person. You never call even a beloved domesticated animal, a house pet, a cat or a dog a person. You know the difference between persons and things. And this dis-tinction you recognize is not one of degree, but one of kind. You don’t say that something is a little more or less of a person, a little more or less of a thing. There is a sharp line that divides persons from things. Now this distinction between person and thing is iden-tical with the distinction between man as a rational animal, distinct in kind, not degree, from all other animals as brutes.

Notice the basic or the fundamental properties which follow from man’s possession of personality, from the fact that man is a person, not a thing. If man were not a person, he would not have special dignity or special status, social or political status in the world. Things do not have this dignity. Things do not have this status. Moreover all the rights and liberties we demand for human beings, their natural and legal rights, their natural and legal liberties, these belong to human beings as persons. They do not belong to things. Only persons have moral responsibility. We do not hold things morally responsible. And personality is the essence of human equality and of man’s superiority to other animals.

Let me spend a moment more on this last point. When the Declara-tion of Independence says all men are equal, what that means in its deepest understanding is that all human beings equally or alike have the quality, the character, of being persons. Their equality is the equality of persons and all the rights and privileges and liber-ties that go with being a person. Not only is human equality to be understood in the fact that all men are persons. But the superiority of men over animals is also in terms of humans being persons and animals being things.

Justice requires us to treat equals equally and unequals unequally. And when the unequals are regarded as unequal in kind because one is a superior kind and the other is an inferior kind, justice re-quires us to treat that kind of inequality different from the inequal-ity which is merely an inequality in degree. Now I say that if man is not superior in kind to other animals, then the rules of justice in terms of which we treat men one way and animals another way would all be wrong. We would have to revise all our standards in the treatment of humans and animals.

Now we regard humans as superior in kind and that justifies us in regarding humans as ends, to be treated as ends whereas brute animals or other things to be treated as means, can be used. Be-cause all humans are equal in kind with one another, because all are persons and as persons equal in kind, one human being must treat another human being as an end.

But suppose that humans were superior to other animals only in degree, that humans were higher animals and other animals were lower animals. Then if humans being higher animals and other animals being lower justifies humans in treating other animals as means, then by the same principle of justice if there are superior races of humans, they would be justified by that difference in de-gree in treating inferior races as things, exploiting them, enslaving them, even killing them. In fact, if man differs from man only in degree and man from animal only in degree, then by the principles of justice we have no defense against Hitler’s doctrine of superior and inferior races and the justification he would give for the supe-rior to enslave, exploit, and kill the inferior.

Finally I come to my last point of practical significance, the valid-ity of the three great religions of the West: Judaism, Mo-hammedanism, and Christianity in both its Catholic and its Protestant forms. The validity of these three great religions de-pends on the truth of the proposition that man is created by God in His own image with a special dignity and a special destiny. If this proposition is not true, then in honesty and frankness and clarity of mind we ought to repudiate Judaism, Mohammedanism, and Chris-tianity as idle myths, as deeply and essentially false.

I’m not asking you to accept my view that the basic tenets of Western moral, political, legal, and religious beliefs are true and that Darwin’s view of man’s origin and nature is false. But I am saying to you that you must decide, decide you must, between these two views. Both cannot be true. You cannot have it both ways. You cannot keep your religious, your political, your moral beliefs and also with another part of your mind hold Darwin’s view of man’s origin and nature to be true.

Let me be sure that I’ve got this point clear. Our actions, I think, should be consistent with our beliefs. A letter from Mrs. McLord raised three points that I would like to consider finally. She said, “Why do you think it is important to take sides on the issue about man’s origin and nature? And how does taking sides influence one’s behavior? And why isn’t it enough,” she says, “merely to be informed about the opposite views of the question?”

I think I have answered these questions, but to be sure let me re-peat these two basic points. I think one’s actions should be consis-tent with one’s beliefs. We are all guilty of hypocrisy if we believe that Darwin is right and that at the same time go on acting as if he were wrong, enjoying the privileges of human dignity, even de-manding those privileges but at the same time denying the very facts on which that dignity and its privileges are based.